MARK FRANKLAND

I wear two hats when I write this blog of mine. First and foremost, I manage a small charity in a small Scottish town called Dumfries. Ours is a front door that opens onto the darker corners of the crumbling world that is Britain 2015. We hand out 5000 emergency food parcels a year in a town that is home to 50,000 souls. Then, as you can see from all of the book covers above, I am also a thriller writer. If you enjoy the blog, you might just enjoy the books. The link below takes you to the whole library in the Kindle store. They can be had for a couple of quid each.

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Monday, May 15, 2017

IT'S TIME FOR 'YES' TO STOP BEING SO BLOODY MEEK AND GET OURSELVES RIGHT INTO SOME WESTMINSTER FACES.

I am quite sure I am far from being alone in feeling like smashing something up every time I am subjected to a dose of election coverage. It has already gone a long, long way beyond pathetic. The Unionists drone on about how rubbish Scottish education is and how the polls say nobody wants Indyref 2. Our lot go all meek and mild and polite and say the schools are really not all that bad and let's not forget how wicked the 'rape clause' is.Oh Christ. The bloody 'rape clause'. I am sick to the back teeth of hearing about the 'rape clause'. Oh, of course it is horrendous. Duh. But to go on and on and on about it is playground politics of the worst kind. How many people in Scotland will it affect? I guess it will a couple of hundred at most. Is this really the sum total of what we have in our armoury? If it is, then God help us. When did we get so petty? How did we drift away from arguing out the huge issues of September 2014 to hoping for nothing better than scoring a few cheap points of Ruth Davidson?I am waiting for someone to point out the fact that the 'rape clause' isn't the real problem: the idea of dissuading people from having more than two kids is the problem. Fair enough, it might make some kind of bleak Stalinist sense in the polluted, over crowded south east corner of the UK. Up here in Scotland it makes no sense at all. We have one of the most rapidly ageing populations in the western world. Added to this, we have a three hundred year old EMIGRATION problem. In a nutshell, Scotland needs every young person it can get. Even if every young family came up with five kids each we would still be a long way short of having the new young blood we need.So what is the real problem? Simple. What is right for London and the South East is almost invariably wrong for Scotland. The answer? Well the answer is straight forward enough. We need to get rid of London rule.The Unionists really must be laughing their socks off at our meekness. Do they lose sleep when we use up every moment we get in front of the cameras to drone on about the rape clause? I don't think so.We need to find a way to get under their skin. To make them lose sleep. To make them angry enough to throw glasses across the room and kick the dog. We need to be a stone in their shoe. So what should we be talking about right now as the days drain away to Saint Theresa's coronation in June?Nukes.Nukes, nukes and nukes again.The Trident deterrent is the biggest Achilles heel we could ever ask for. Now we should make like Graham Souness and start kicking at their weak point until the tendons pop.So why is Trident a better thing to bang on about than the rape clause? Let's weigh the impact of the two issues. One makes life cruelly uncomfortable for a couple of hundred damaged women whilst the other has the capacity to pretty much end human life as we know it. Kind of obvious, right? But what is new? Can we find a new angle or will we merely be banging out thirty year old arguments? Well here's the good news, we have a whole bunch of new ammunition which is all but guaranteed to have any Tory defense spokesman wriggling on the hook like an over privileged worm.Number one.Let's go up to the minute topical. Windows XP. Trident runs on Windows XP, as in the very same open door operating system we have just seen hacked to pieces. To be fair, we are not alone in this. Most of the US military also runs on Windows XP. Right now they are running as fast as they can to do an upgrade. In the meantime they have cut a deal with Microsoft whereby the Pentagon has coughed up $31 million to make sure they get the system upgrades they need to be safe. So what about us? Surely we will be fine. After all, for the last seven years we have been in the hands of the strong and stable brigade.Ah. Well. Actually......You've got it. No deal with Microsoft. No system upgrades. These clowns are spending £100 billion on the nukes whilst penny pinching a lousy few million to keep the operating system secure. There's incompetence and there's complete utter mind boggling incompetence......... Over the last few months we have learned quite a lot about how good the Russians are at hacking stuff. We should probably take a moment here. Who are we aiming our treasured nukes at? Mainly Russia. Are they happy about this? No, they're really pissed off about it. Would they rather not have to worry about us threatening to burn millions of their citizens to death? I think they would actually be quite keen not to have that worry. Conclusion? I think it is fair to assume they will already have hacked through our Windows XP system and they will now be in a position to shut the whole thing down long before Saint Theresa gets the chance to murder a million Muscovites in the name of strength and stability.Are they going to advertise this? Of course not. Instead whey will sit back and watch us waste £100 billion on a heap of junk. Wouldn't you?Next up. The maintenance contract. This is a real beauty. We own the submarines, but the actual missile system.... well that's a whole different ball game. Technically we buy the nukes off the Americans for top dollar. But there are plenty of strings attached to the deal. A Trident missile needs a full service every 18 months or it won't work. Guess what? We are not allowed to do the servicing. The contract we have signed means only the Americans can do the servicing. And here is the real jaw dropper. The right to withdraw all servicing and thereby render the nukes completely useless falls squarely in the realms of a Presidential decree.As in Donald Trump. It is entirely his call. If we piss off the Donald, he is in a position to throw one of his trademark tantrums and make our nuclear deterrent little more than a bunch of scrap metal.Next.The right honourable Michael Fallon, Her Majesty's Secretary of State for Defence. A few days ago Mr Fallon casually ditched decades of cast in stone policy with a single off the cuff statement. It has always been British policy only to use nuclear weapons in retaliation. Never, ever would we be the first to start the madness.Well. Not any more. We have now joined the first strike club along with North Korea. You really would have though such a monumental change of policy might have required a vote in Parliament. It seems not. Saint Theresa doesn't really do Parliament.Last and probably least is the inconvenient fact that lots of countries are well on the road to developing mini underwater drones. In a few years time there will be thousands and thousands of these things dodging about under the oceans. So what? So it will mean there will be no possibility of a Trident submarine staying hidden. And if a Trident sub isn't hidden, it isn't worth a light. All kinds of Generals and Admirals have pointed this out to the strong and stable brigade and begged then to stop wasting the defense budget on the ultimate vanity project. They would rather we had a few more soldiers and an aircraft carrier with some planes on it.Not surprisingly these pleas have fallen on deaf ears.These are new and compelling reasons why we shouldn't have the abomination of Trident on Scottish soil. So what might we do with these compelling reasons?Well there isn't much point in raising our concerns politely because the Unionist media will just ignore us.As per usual.Instead we need to raise the ante. First up we turn their guns on them and point out how the polls show a clear majority of Scots don't want nuclear weapons in our country.We accept as things stand we are not allowed to unilaterally vote for their removal in the Holyrood Parliament. Defense is reserved to Whitehall forever and ever, amen.So what do we do? Well I chucked this idea out a few weeks ago and it only gets more tempting. We could pass a law in Holyrood banning any nuclear weapons from travelling on any Scottish road. Our roads are not devolved. Our roads are all ours. Then we instruct our police force who are also not devolved to set up a permanent road block outside the gates of Faslane to make sure no nukes get in or out.Oh that would get their attention. I don't think we would have to worry about this particular policy winning a few column inches in the Daily Mail.Next the Scottish Government could send a nice clear information leaflet to every household in Scotland explaining why our roads will no longer be available for the transportation of weapons of mass destruction. We lay out each and every piece of evidence of gross Westminster incompetence item by item. We quote every senior admiral and general who has spelled out the glaring truth of what an complete and utter waste of time and money Trident really is.Then it would be time to look London in the eye and ask what they are about to do about it? Invade?Oh really? Again?Trident is basically a complete fiasco. It is greatest waste of public money in our long history. It won't stand any degree of scrutiny. It wouldn't take so very long for the whole thing to become a monumental embarrassment.Just take a moment and imagine how good it would feel to watch them flounder about.It would be better than good. Certainly better than droning on and on and on about the bloody rape clause.

4 comments:

As a lifelong member of CND, I wholly agree with both your sentiments and your approach, and have argued for something like this for years.Your broader point about how the election is being fought by the SNP is also broadly true. I can't understand why we are not getting more assertion, fight and even aggression against the so called Tory "resurgence", which seems to have some of the worst elements do Scottish society coalescing round the Union Flag and frankly getting away with murder, or even proposing and inciting murder, as with the creepy Peterhead fishing fascist.I am told by friends to calm down. I can see no reason to do so.